Giving Up

Giving Up
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 5, 2015

The tree is up. Faux-pine and nuclear-green, it is a six-foot monument to the wonders of PVC and all things ersatz at Christmas. Ours is pretending to be a Norway Spruce. It stands unsteadily on our lounge carpet, tripod legs seeking terra firma beneath two inches of 1990’s plush pile carpet.

I bought our tree second-hand from a school fete. Fifteen Christmases have taken their toll. The tips of its branches have sloughed off their plastic skins to expose wire claws which rake your arm and sting like a cat scratch. Brush against the cellophane foliage and our tree sheds clouds of glitter.

This year I’ve abandoned my tree-trimming fantasies to allow my 8-year-old and his small sister decorating carte blanche. Clearly, they’ve inherited their father’s gene for dressing. They give no thought to proportion or colour coordination. They choke the lower branches with thick black cables knotted with our lumpish hand-me-down lights. Some strands they wind tightly around the trunk, some hang floppy and loose. Symmetry is ignored in favour of attaching a decade of kindergarten craft to the same five branches. An argument breaks out over whose lopsided paper stars are whose, and whether the toilet-roll Santa should hang next to his toilet-roll wife. A red globe blows and takes out its neighbours on either side. Our tree is both festive and fire hazard.

Already, a pyramid of presents leans against the trunk. These are the ones Santa allows me to buy for cousins and nannas. I am the Christmas shopper in our house. Somehow, the job always falls to me. The Grinch I live with abhors what he calls the ‘sad spectacle of materialism gone mad.’ He makes a sterling effort for birthdays and anniversaries, but I can’t enthuse him with a soupcon of Christmas spirit.

“What would you like the kids to get you this year?” I ask as he props at the kitchen bench with his morning paper.

“Socks and jocks,” he intones, without looking up.

“C’mon,” I plead. “You say that every year.” (What he really wants is someone to make a fuss over his December birthday.)

“Well,” I say to his centre part. “I know what I’d like. An extension ladder.”

His head jerks up.

“Only kidding. I’d like some lingerie.”

He rolls his eyes. This is the signal that this year, like last year (and the eight before that), I should buy my own Christmas present. I may even need to wrap it, on Christmas Eve, at midnight, with a pavlova still in the oven. Six hours later, I’ll feign surprise when I open it.

“You shouldn’t have!” I’ll say, throwing my arms around his neck.

Following the script, he’ll reply: “I know, darling. I hope you like it.”

This is the problem with gifting between couples: our expectations get in the way. I see Christmas as an opportunity to find my beloved a gift that symbolises our marital nirvana. He sees Christmas as an interruption to the sports pages.

In relationships, presents come loaded with assumptions, judgments and occasionally, disappointment. Givers guess – and hope to find – the perfect gift; receivers have to figure out the agenda behind the gift and then respond accordingly. It’s exhausting trying to be a mind-reader. Instead, I like to apply my first law of Christmas shopping: be gracious if your receiver is not delighted with your choice of present.

This time last year, I remembered my wannabe weather-man had admired an old ship’s barometer we’d seen in an antique shop window. And so I set about finding him one.

I scoured op-shops and auction lists until finally, a dealer handed me the card of a maritime collector up the coast. He gave me a fascinating hour on the history of ships’ instruments. He’d restored two barometers, one of which was a handsome piece with a circular timber mount and the beryllium and copper mechanism on display.

Back home, I smuggled my expensive treasure inside and wrapped it, folding hospital corners into the shipwreck-themed paper I’d found.

On Christmas morning, el capitan looked nonplussed as he peeled away the paper to reveal his prize. I watched a frown crease his forehead as he inspected his new antique. “It’s from 1907,” I said proudly. “Hand-carved oak and the original glass. See? Restored by a specialist. I drove to Yanchep to find it.”

He looked from the barometer to me and laughed. “You know, darling, there’s this marvellous invention they call the internet? Day or night, you can press a button and it’ll tell you everything about the weather!”

It was at that point I stood up, smoothed my apron and flounced away to check on the turkey.

Perhaps this year, I’ll get him his damned socks and jocks after all.

Too Busy to Care

Too Busy to Care
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday June 21, 2014

They were locked together in amorous congress: two shopping trolleys refusing to part. “Stand clear!” I warned small daughter, handing her my bag. I grabbed the trolley handles and tried using brutish force to wrench them apart.

“Having fun yet?” I heard a woman say.

I turned to fit a face to the familiar voice. She was a schoolmate from last century. I hadn’t seen her in years. “How are you?” I beamed.

“Busy!” she sighed and rolled her eyes. “So busy! Crazy busy!” she said, before rattling off a list of work commitments and social obligations. “The school wanted me on its fundraising committee – how could I say no? And we’ve just started renovating the house,” she continued. “The carpenter keeps turning up at 10 to 7!”

Her young kids were crazy busy too. “Swimming training, hockey, orchestra, maths tutoring Tuesdays and Thursdays” she reeled off. “And the weekends are manic too!” She shook her ponytail in mock exasperation.

I couldn’t work out if she wanted my commiserations, or my congratulations. I stood nodding and smiling dumbly, feeling insignificant. She glanced at her phone. “Gawd! It’s nearly 4. Gotta go!” and blew me a kiss. “Must catch up properly! Let’s put something in the diary!” and she dashed off to the butcher’s.

Four-year-old and I gave up on the untangling of trolleys. I grabbed a shopping basket instead. Looping the aisles, I couldn’t stop thinking about my friend lamenting the frenetic pace of her life.

Almost everyone I know is busy. Perpetual busyness has become an epidemic. Maybe even a boast. People with crowded schedules should be admired for their drive and dedication, shouldn’t they?

Being busy used to make me feel important. Or at least valued. A decade ago, I was a single mum with a three-year-old son and a full-time job that required constant travel. I was always racing from home to work, or work to home. My frantic existence had a point – I was shackled to a big mortgage and determined to hang onto my house. Mostly I was just exhausted and jittery.

Now, I’m busy by choice. I still get anxious on those days I’m swamped by my (often self-imposed) obligations. But on quiet days, I feel guilty for taking it easy, for being less-than-productive. Busyness is addictive.

And yet we’re supposed to have more freedoms than ever. We’re living with internet-aided efficiency, caressed by our portable technology and with time-saving appliances awaiting our commands.

Right now, the dishwasher’s throaty gurgling means there’s one less load of dishes for me. I let the washing machine struggle through a week’s worth of school uniforms. I’ll stuff them into the dryer if it’s still raining and suppress my guilt at heating the planet with my wrinkle-free cycle.

I put on the kettle and pay the $80 parking ticket I’ve been hiding in the glove box. I head out with the kids to buy two kilos of grout so the tiler can fix the leaky shower. Next I’ll stock up on milk, eggs and dolphin-friendly tinned tuna, deliver youngest child to a birthday extravaganza, middle lad to soccer practice and eldest son to the skate park.

For me, mother-of-three, working from home, that’s a busy afternoon. But to the Iraqi waitress I’ve befriended at the local cafe, my afternoon must sound like a holiday.

She works day-shift at the cafe, then catches the train to Fremantle to be a kitchen-hand in a French bistro by night. “This word ‘busy?”’ she asks, as she clears the adjacent table, layering its dirty plates along her arm. “I don’t understand what you mean by ‘too busy.’ Maybe you mean ‘tired?’” I decide I’m not that busy after all.

We all know people who flaunt their hectic timetables to impress others. Parading a bustling life of material privilege has become a marker of social status. Perhaps I covet my crowded to-do list because I don’t really want to slow down? Maybe busyness is a hedge against emptiness?

Only yesterday, I caught myself moaning to the neighbour opposite about the tatty state of our front garden. “There’s just no time,” I said. And there it was: my own self-delusion. “Of course there’s time,” I thought later, “I’m not that busy! I’m the laziest busy person I know. Lazy – and a prized procrastinator.”

That night, my breadwinner barrelled through the door just in time for the TV news. As he subsided into the sofa, I regaled him with my front-yard epiphany in absorbing detail. “Maybe we’re not all as busy as we think we are?” I concluded my story, hoping he’d disagree. “Is being overwhelmed a sign I’m no good at time management?”

“You wouldn’t be half as busy if you stopped gossiping on the phone to your girlfriends,” he replied. “What’s for dinner?”